@Jongware – just tested your snippet.
1. It works well, if the Italic text style ranges are not formatted with a character style ("Italic").
2. It does work halfway, if the a character style ("Italic") is applied: the end tag will show the formatting of the character style.
3. It does not work at all (no tags applied), if a GREP style is used for the Italic text style ranges.
Wheras a Text Search or a GREP Search in the UI is finding* the Italic formatting used by a GREP style.
*surprisingly all occasions but the last one in my test document:
I did a GREP Style for \d+ using a character style set to "Italic".
Have to do some more testing, if this is a bug in my InDesign CS5.5 on OSX 10.6.8.
Here a screen shot from my German UI (sorry, might be confusing at the first glance).
The alert at the bottom means: "Search ended" (no furher instances found). But obviously there is another one not found just in the next paragraph. The scope of the search is set to document wide!
Uwe